Basketball Jones[1]

Uh-oh

About five or six years ago I hung up my sneakers for good.

Or so I thought.

I had "retired" once before, after a crushing elbow to the face in the late 90's. It was the wise choice I thought. My left ankle was, and continues to be, a non-flexible mass of bone chips, scar tissue, duct tape, and gravel. My fingers had been jammed and hyper-extended more times than I could remember. It was time to be an adult, time to pursue adult sports like tennis and golf.

During that first hiatus I already considered myself primarily a mountain biker, runner, and skier. Individual, outdoor sports. They were better suited to my stengths. Hoops? I had long arms. That was the complete list of my roundball assets. I lacked explosive speed, my hands are on the left side of the dwarf->Rondo continuum, and the days of getting up to the rim were gone by the time I was 25.

My jumper sucked; I was a 6' 175 lb. guy who played in the post and never met a drive he didn't like. But after getting hammered for too long in the paint I decided it was time to quit.

Retirement #1 didn't stick of course. Once I moved to NH and was in grad school I started up again. It was basically free entertainment, an important consideration for a grad student. I hadn't quit mountain biking, but was only a casual participant, my first real racing was a couple of years off. The trail running bug hadn't bit. It was good exercise.

But the teens and 20-somethings at the playground were getting so much faster and stronger (though I realize now, of course, that I was getting slower and weaker). The injuries took even longer to heal.

Why go on with a young man's game?

So I hung em up once again. Stopped checking the weather to see if it was raining at the playground, stopped working on that spin and lefty scoop shot move, stopped nursing a laundry list of nagging injuries. It was hard to let go, but I didn't t want to be that creepy old guy at the gym with googles and white socks.

So when the Bride recently brought me news of an old-guy's game in a nearby town, I should have said, "Interesting, but those days are behind me." Instead the UPS man brought me a new ankle brace and some shiny new kicks today. It might be a bad idea, but time to see if anything is left in the tank.

[1] For you youngsters, but be warned it's from 1974 and isn't very PC.